CLIENT CASE STUDY

Barilla’s secret recipe: IT services

Lowering IT operating costs by double digits year-over-year

Innovation is all about new ideas, right? In the digital age, ideas won’t get you far without the latest applications and a stable, modern IT infrastructure. Barilla collaborated with Accenture to make its IT organization more cost-effective and competitive with a long-term partnership in IT and application management services.

BARILLA’S SECRET RECIPE

In today’s digital marketplace, companies need to be cost-competitive, innovative and flexible—and technology is the key enabler. How could the food company, Barilla, discover the secret recipe needed to help its IT department lower costs and drive innovation? While reducing its IT infrastructure and application running costs was crucial, it wanted to focus its IT department on more strategic activities and driving results for the business. Barilla collaborated with Accenture to transform and renew its IT operations in Europe and the United States—and improve service levels. The long-term contract aims to drive benefits and synergies by managing the infrastructure and applications in a single, common global model.

CREATING A MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Accenture established a multi-tower approach that changed the delivery model for the company’s broader IT organization. From the outset, the team set about enabling innovation as well as reducing costs. Together, they transformed the existing infrastructure by:

Migrating to the latest technologies, platforms and applications; the team migrated the company’s SAP ECC enterprise resource planning solution to the latest SAP HANA technology and database

Implementing a global, multilingual help desk across applications and infrastructure under the umbrella of a common IT service model and stronger service level agreements in place across geographies

Consolidating more than 100 applications on multiple technologies and across all business areas under a common application services framework with clear service level agreements and global governance

Moving routine IT delivery tasks to cost-effective resources in the Accenture Delivery Centers in India

Managing the governance, including services and the innovation areas, and updating business stakeholders

The application and infrastructure services teams worked in sync to make this complex double jump—moving every single database, operating system and software to the newest technology available. Because Accenture handled infrastructure and applications, teams could provide extensive support and communications, as well as harmonized testing processes to mitigate risk. The program reached a steady state after only six months.

STABLE LAUNCHPAD FOR INNOVATION

With Accenture’s help, Barilla has experienced a double-digit, year-over-year reduction in IT operating costs across infrastructure, data centers and application management. The new integrated support structure helps to mitigate risk with more stable applications and infrastructure. And Barilla employees benefit from having a single point of contact for all IT needs and improved service. Barilla IT resources now focus on value-added project management, rather than IT delivery, to transform its current application map, drive the SAP HANA implementation and serve the business as an innovation enabler. Accenture continues to work with Barilla’s IT department to help managers understand how they can exploit the new tools and technologies on innovative projects. Barilla now has a strong, cost-effective IT infrastructure and application foundation in place to increase its competitiveness with cutting-edge solutions.

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